Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Month: November 2008

  • Mankiw (Mis) Channels Romer

    In the grand conservative tradition of cherry-picking convenient quotations, Greg Mankiw pulls one from Christina and David Romer’s paper, “The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes” (PDF). Tax changes have very large effects on output. Our baseline specification suggests that an exogenous tax increase of one percent of GDP lowers real GDP by roughly three percent.…

  • Why Prosperity Requires a Welfare State

    I’ve been spending a lot of time lately pondering James Livingston’s insights on how modern, high-productivity, post-industrial economies work, as expressed in two of his posts which I link to and encapsulate here. What finally closed the loop for me was re-reading Ray Kurzweil and others on past trends, and what the future holds: exponential…

  • Investing: Government Knows Better

    I know: that headline is hate speech. But the fact is that it’s sometimes true. Take education. Here’s the kind of reliable payoffs we get from investing there: And this doesn’t even count the long-term aid to business that education spending provides. Remember: few businesses are seriously constrained by a lack of investment capital (only…

  • Tyler Cowen Ignores the Elephant

    Tyler Cowen’s Sunday NYT discussion of The New Deal is getting all sorts of play in the econoblogosphere–pro and con. What’s not getting much discussion (except here) is the elephant that Tyler rather inexplicably fails to even mention: massive government (deficit) spending during the war. (It’s not the war, stupid, it’s the spending.) The consensus…

  • Do Wealthy Investors Create Growth and Prosperity? Not So Much

    Here’s the central tenet of supply-side/trickle-down/voodoo Reaganomics: If rich people get (and keep) more money, they will invest it and promote economic growth, so everyone will prosper. That would (perhaps) be true if a shortage of investment were an important constraint on businesses and on economic growth. But according to the people who run those…

  • Obama Deploys Radical Linguistic Coherence Strategy

    I don't usually offer up whole posts from others, but Andy Borowitz pones this one. I can't improve on it. Obama’s Use of Complete Sentences Stirs ControversyStunning Break with Last Eight Years In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through…

  • Who Says “Soft Power” Doesn’t Matter?

    World leaders won't even shake Bush's hand: Related posts: “Cheering Germans Will Not Send More Troops to Afghanistan” Weimar, Zimbabwe, Here We Come Economies Need a Gardener’s Invisible Hand Joe Thinks Obama’s an Appeaser, and FDR Caused The Great Depression McCain’s Steel Ceiling: Who Loves Ya, Baby?

  • “Springboard,” Not Safety Net

    I wrote an email to economist Alan Blinder at Princeton last week (which he was kind enough to respond to), in response to his NYT piece addressing our current…issues. “social safety net”…America’s is in tatters…we need both repairs and a new metaphor. Lyndon B. Johnson had it right when he called upon the government to…

  • Kristol’s Conservative Economic Cluelessness

    Now that he’s finished his series of columns giving sage political advice to John McCain (hey John, how’d that Palin pick work out for you?), Bill Kristol thinks he has some good ideas for a Republican party that is wondering whether it has any apparent reason for  continued existence. To begin with, Republicans should: …develop…

  • Want Prosperity? Tax the Rich

    The right-wing blogosphere has lately been touting a table that the Norquistina Tax Foundation cherry-picked from a recent OECD study, showing that the U.S. has the most progressive income tax system in the OECD–perhaps excepting Ireland. This may well be true. But I’m not totally sure what they’re trying to say–except maybe that the U.S.…

  • A Land of Magical Thinking: Becoming a Millionaire

    I saw mention of this statistic in a blog comment last week, and went looking. Here is the central faith-based delusion regarding The American Dream: Belief: 45% of Americans think it is somewhat or very likely that they will become wealthy in their lifetimes.* Fact: in 2005, 5.7% of households were worth a million dollars…

  • Bring Back the Philosopher Kings

    Paul Light’s proposal in yesterday’s NYT should be receiving enthusiastic support from Fareed Zakaria and Bryan Caplan. Light’s proposal: Congress should create a federal commission to draw up reorg/efficiency plans for the U.S. government. The key rule that legislators need to include: those plans would be submitted to congress for an up-or-down vote, with no…

  • “Cheering Germans Will Not Send More Troops to Afghanistan”

    The Economist gets this one utterly wrong–explaining, perhaps, why that august newspaper tragically endorsed the war in Iraq (and has yet to acknowledge the tragedy of that endorsement). They don't understand true power. True power–its sine qua non–is the ability to get people to do what you want them to do (with the least possible…

  • The Man Who Shorted Subprime (Must Read)

    The End of Wall Street's Boom – National Business News – Print – Portfolio.com. Run don't walk to read this. It's gripping. About Steve Eisman, who started shorting every subprime play in sight back in 2005, while simultaneously proclaiming market insanity to anyone who would listen–in decidedly not-fit-to-print language. It's long, but you won't be…

  • Extreme Thinking: Dangerous? Or Just Irrelevant?

    A recent Bryan Caplan post finally crystallized for me why I find so much libertarian thinking and commentary to be irrelevant: The philosophically insightful breakdown, rather, is the "statist-libertarian" spectrum. Here's the best way to sum up my outlook: The endpoints of the political spectrum are not the "far left" Michael Moore and the "far…

  • Conservative “Intellectual” “Ascendancy”

    Brad DeLong appropriately derides a WSJ piece by Mark Lilla, who bemoans the decline of conservative intellect. The key Lilla line: For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant. Wrong. It has been ascendant because it promised and delivered lower taxes. It’s…

  • What’s With Arkansas (and Tennessee and Oklahoma)?

    I was looking again at the maps of which way voters swung from 2004 to 2008, and noticed an odd anomaly: a hard line at Arkansas' northern, southern, and eastern borders (and to a lesser extent at Tennessee and Oklahoma borders). At Arkansas' eastern border, well, there's a big river there. But elsewhere, wouldn't you…

  • The “Patriotic Pugnacity” Platform

    The most striking anomaly in the recent election, to my eyes, was the strong Red countermovement among Appalachians and Okies: These areas swung even harder right this year, while almost every other part of the country went left (excepting McCain’s home state). Steve Sailer (he of the quite convincing “affordable family formation” thesis), explains this…

  • Yes We Did. Yes We Will.

    A government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth. No related posts.

  • Making Voters Rational: Mail ‘Em a Ballot

    I can’t believe I haven’t posted about Bryan Caplan‘s The Myth of the Rational Voter, a book that I spend a lot of time thinking about (and frequently disagreeing with). You can get the gist of it over on Amazon; I’ll just say that it greatly advances the discussion regarding the (de)merits of democracy. Cf.…